Eight Subscriptions You Won’t Hate
In our current political climate, I find myself in a new and precarious position — news junkie. Despite it’s rumored decline and failings, I still rely on Twitter for a lot of my news updates as well as a few well-informed friends on Facebook who win me over with biting commentary. But if I’m not careful, I’ll end up travelling down a deep, deep rabbit hole of articles and videos which, I have learned the hard way, is really not healthy. So I’ve converted to a new addiction: newsletter subscriptions. I check my email first thing in the morning, every day without fail, so these have become my go-to sources of information as I start the day off. What’s more, some of them are written rather delicately so that the news is more palatable than if you, for example, had to digest it from Fox or MSNBC. So now, permit me to share the best news newsletters.
NEXT DRAFT
Written by Dave Pell, who is himself a news junkie, Next Draft is curated by him personally from 50 different news sites he trolls. He selects the ten most fascinating stories and sends them to your inbox with concise, pithy observations that will “make your computer device vibrate with delight.” SUBSCRIBE HERE.
theSKIMM
The Skimm “makes it easier to be smarter.” It was started by two gals (girl power!) in their 20s, working at NBC in breaking news, political news, and documentaries. News was a clear mutual passion of theirs and once they clicked, it did not take long for theSkimm to luanch into the ether right off their living room couch. The Daily Skimm breaks down in easy-to-understand verbiage everything you need to know to start your day. SUBSCRIBE HERE.
P.S. (If you are already familiar with theSKIMM, you may have recognized that I totally ripped off my color scheme from them!)
THELI.ST
How’s this for an opener? “We believe that there is a lot of money to be made from taking women seriously and that a rising tide lifts all boats.” SO IN, right? TheLi.st is committed to diversity and inclusion and animated by a mission of #ChangeTheRatio: Increasing visibility, access and opportunity for women and other underrepresented constituencies, across every field that needs it. It is more than news; it is a network and visibility platform for professional women from all industries who are ambitious, accomplished and committed to helping each other rise. “Listers” land investors, partnerships, earned media, speaking opportunities, great jobs, great hires, great advice and beyond. SUBSCRIBE HERE.
#WTFJHT
As in, “What the fuck just happened today?” Curated by journalist Matt Kiser, he actually cites theSKIMM as one of the newsers that inspired him to create the site. It’s dedicated to all news coming out of the White House and Kiser does his best to take a “neutral-ish position” on all things. Sometimes he is more successful than others but I appreciate that he not only breaks down the news, he does it in a way that explains it to less savvy consumers like me and tells you why you should care about it. It is digestable and my essential guide to the daily shock and awe of our nation’s politics. SUBSCRIBE HERE.
CHEAT SHEET
The Daily Beast claims their “cheat sheet” is a “speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don’t).” That is mostly true. They are, in this liberal’s opinion, a liberally biased outlet — but that is okay with me. You’ll get ten headlines daily, mostly politically focused, but I often see tech and entertainment mixed in and their paragraph-length summaries of each item makes it nice and easy to read through. SUBSCRIBE HERE (make sure you check the right box — they offer a lot of newsletters).
THE DAILY EYE OPENER
As Charlie Rose says every morning on CBS This Morning, “your world in 90 seconds.” Everyone has their morning news show of choice and mine is CBS This Morning. And right after they welcome you to the broadcast, they launch into this minute-and-a-half long video montage of the top news from the previous 24 hours, set to some music and peppered with commentary from the late night hosts so that you can chuckle to yourself while running through it. But if you don’t watch the show, or if you happen to still be in the shower when it airs, you can subscribe to it as well. SUBSCRIBE HERE.
NEED 2 KNOW
If you’re still jonesing for more easy-to-swallow news content, Need 2 Know sends out a daily email with news stories you ‘need 2 know’, from politics and business to sports and entertainment. It’s short and sweet with a little humor blended in. If the news is “hard boiled,” these folks are serving it up “over easy.” Fun fact about these guys also — one of the co-founders is an Emmy Award winning TV journalist, the other still works for Steve Madden shoes. SUBSCRIBE HERE.
INSIDE
Inside is a little different as it is not a singular newsletter — it is a network of newsletters focused on an array of topics and they are always accepting newsletter theme ideas. They pride themselves on intimacy so you can even hit reply to any of their newsletters and you’ll find a real person is on the receiving end and may actually get back to you. They have an app as well wherein you can customize your feed with whatever news you like to see and, similarly to Reddit, you can thumbs up or thumbs down stories to let the Editors know if it was helpful to you and enable them to more finely curate your content. Confession: I found out about Inside when Mark Cuban did an interview where admitted he only has 13 apps on his phone and Inside is one of them. SUBSCRIBE HERE.
BONUS PROTIP
FEEDLY
Well, if you’re anything like me, in addition to being a chronic news-reader, you also enjoy a fair amount of blogs about a myriad of topics. But we simply can’t subscribe to everything, can we? (Well, maybe you can. I cannot.) Feedly is an aggregation tool that can be plugged into most web browsers or downloaded to your mobile device to compile news feeds from a variety of online sources. So in one place, I can scroll through the headlines from a ton of websites and click on what I want to read, skip what I don’t want to read, and even mark some items for later. It’s very easy to use and I’ve even got my sources categorized with themes like “food,” “fashion” and “friends.” START USING IT HERE.